


Breathing

by Davechicken



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Interrogation, Mental violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:46:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6535657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davechicken/pseuds/Davechicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Do you have any drabbles about Ren using Force ! Interrogation? What it feels like for the person he's doing it to? About him practicing it for the first time? How does he control how far he takes it? Has he ever 'accidentally' gone too far and broken someone completely?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathing

The first time Ben Organa-Solo realised he was able to go into other people’s minds… he didn’t really understand. There’d been something he wanted, and he’d been _young_ , and when you’re young and you **want things** , then it’s the end of the world if you don’t get them. Whether it was his favourite stuffed Wookie toy, or another cookie, or a juice box… if he didn’t have it _now_ , then he was going to die. Or at least scream.

So he’d tried to get someone to give him things, and been told off. He hadn’t really worked out _why_ , but it made people mad, and he didn’t like when Mom and Dad got upset with him. 

***

Growing up, the temptation was always there (as was the _voice_ , encouraging him, urging him on). Life would be so much easier for him if he could just get people to do what he wanted. Sure, he thought about making his teacher forget she’d given him an assignment. Sure, he thought about making the assholes who loved to make fun of his face shut up (or worse). 

He didn’t even always do it deliberately. He’d be happily (or not) doing his own thing, when someone would have the audacity to _feel things_ in his vicinity, and it would be like listening to private thoughts that made him feel uncomfortable. People hadn’t given him permission, but they hadn’t asked _his_ permission to make him **know** , either. 

He’d hear his parents’ distress. 

He’d know when a classmate got her first period.

He’d know when someone was terrified their grade would mean they couldn’t carry on their studies for their career path.

He heard it all.

Sometimes he did it, anyway. He got what he wanted, and he felt bad about it, even if the _voice_ told him not to.

***

Uncle Luke said it was okay to use things for good reasons. Like, to save lives. Not to force your way through things because it was easier. Ben had been offended that he thought he _would_ (even if he had). 

So they worked on it, a little. With all the other abilities his Jedi Master tried to show him how to control, they would work on pushing thoughts through. 

Ben never asked if he’d show him how to resist. He didn’t know why.

***

The Supreme Leader had no such qualms. The weak were there to be ruled over, and if they couldn’t resist his new student, Kylo Ren, then they deserved to be controlled.

Kylo had agreed. Of course.

His training was mostly practical. The Leader gave him things to _do_ , and then urged him to use his emotions at the same time. ~~Kylo had been confused, because it didn’t feel like there was much teaching going on, and most of the things were the same as the Jedi way, except he was supposed to _feel_ instead of _control_?~~

There was often a goal in mind. He worked better with a goal. He liked them. They made sense. He would enter this mind _because_ it had information they needed. He would kill that person _because_ they were dangerous, and to send a message. 

~~If there wasn’t a reason, he made one up.~~

The first time, he was finding out the locations of Jedi who had escaped the purge. The victim was tied to a simple chair, and Kylo paced around them, watching them. He was tall, but he hadn’t filled out properly, and the boots he wore were a little uncomfortable around the toes. The mask and cloak made up for his youthful frame and face, the modulator making his normally deep (and occasionally squeaky) voice turn even and sure. He paced around them ~~(her, it was a female, her, stop ridding her of her identity)~~ and sensed their fear and it made him stronger. Made him stronger. **MADE HIM STRONGER.**

The fear he let in, and he felt his own anxiety kick up, too. He tried to let anger in, anger about what the Jedi had done, and a self-righteous fury, and then it had all just sloshed about like primordial soup inside his head. It was fuel, and he burned like a rocket breaking from the planet’s gravity well. 

Kylo wasn’t sure if he asked the questions aloud or not. He rushed into their mind with all his adolescent fury, and ripped through memories. Ripped through their loudest ones (horror and terror at his appearance, a fear of pain, a fear of death) and pushed harder (flickers of guilty acts, as if this were a trial of their soul, a parade of things nowhere near as dark as his own sins) and–

–they didn’t push back, but he hadn’t learned how to shield _himself_. The fear and recriminations and regrets caused him to reflect back into himself, and he slammed down hard inside on the connection before he could give anything away. (Or… anything more.)

“Tell me where they are.”  


The other had seemed too glassy-eyed in fear to understand his own weakness, or they didn’t know what was going on. The next time he went in, he focussed with everything he had on the thing he wanted, and he ripped through memories and thoughts like bloody fingers pulling open a fresh wound. The _woman_ screamed, at the violation of her thoughts, the loss of control, the _lack of care_ when pulled through her worst memories. No compassion, no consideration. Forced to relive her deepest, darkest sins at full throttle, full force, one after the other with no respite. The pain of intrusion, the singular purpose. He used her screaming as an external focus point, something to navigate and keep himself out of his own head as he got to the kernel of the answer.

When he left, she was a shaking mess. He had no idea what the Order did with her, after that.

***

It got easier each time. He had to remember not to let his own emotional battery tether him to his own experiences. He could use his own feelings, but he had to be wary of chasing them back to the root cause, or he ran the risk of vanishing inside of his own head. Instead, he learned how to artificially feel his emotions without remembering _what_ had triggered them.

Pain, anger, guilt, fear, longing… all became abstract sensations, imprints left on the world, the original marker forgotten. A connect and a disconnect in one, an unconscious, unknowing thing.

He learned how to use his own sensation to find it in another. Whatever drove them hardest, whatever they flinched from most. He’d rake through them and see which wounds bled hardest, and he’d hone in on them like a predator scenting the weakest member of the herd. 

It became as easy as any other technique, once he learned how. Find the way in, push along it. Most were too cowed to last long, and not thinking about the Rancor in the room meant they thought about the Rancor in the room, and he could get to his quarry quickly. 

If he felt like quickly. Sometimes a morbid curiosity had him wander a little, too, but not often. Mostly he wanted the job over and done with. He’d got enough of a rep by now, and those given to him would soon end up incinerated anyway, so it wasn’t as if they would go out and spread the tales of the Dread Kylo, Master of Ren. They came in, and he went out, and that told the troopers all they needed to know. 

Occasionally they were harder to crack. If they had training in interrogation resistance, or they were stubborn, or if they had some Force-sensitivity, it became more of a challenge. They would loudly think of other things, or throw up road blocks. He would have to force his way past them, refusing to let himself be distracted. That usually led to more screaming. 

The worst was when it was someone who had known him _before_. Those ones - the ones who knew another name, one **banned, barred, blockaded** \- would try to shake his focus with _false pasts_ (true, true, all true). The first time someone said _that name_ when he was inside his head, he lost his temper.

He lost his temper, and the resulting mess meant there was not much information left to retrieve.

He had been ashamed to tell the Leader. The Leader found out anyway.

Kylo had to work harder, then. The Leader didn’t give him much in the way of guidance, more the _disappointment_ and the threat of _abandonment_ that meant he had to work out how to do better, how not to disappoint him again. Taller and taller went the wall between _was_ and _is_. He learned to push his rage or rejection and denial into external pain. The more they taunted, the harder he fought back. 

Breathing.

It was like breathing.

It was fine, so long as you didn’t realise you were doing it. Then it became the hardest thing in the world to do right.


End file.
